Leader of Mans [uDG 2011]

Guys, guys, this is trivial. What you need to do is take the pixel, transmute it into LAB space, and fit a polynomial of degree 2 to the three points. Compress the three coefficients with a bias on the L channel. This is O(n) in time, and storing a Huffman tree of these stratified coefficient bitstreams would be tractable.

There are no known issues in this build, unless I forgot them! I've done a lot more polish with the user interface. Thanks all for the suggestions. I've added a bunch of small islands, and moved things around a bit. The plot is a bit more developed, although I didn't finish the pyramid mission yet.

From popular request you can shift click to cast multiple miracles or to drop multiple resources at once. (Click a resource, then shift click several times on the ground).

I've also added a few more sounds, and shrunk the build by just a tiny amount (in spite of the new content!)

Worked on my 10.6.8 MacBook. Played the shit out of Actraiser, so I did appreciate the inspiration. I suppose it's supposed to be a sandboxy sort of game, but I think adding some gameplay balance probably would make it a better game. You are constrained by resources how many buildings you can create, but not how many dudes you can make, which seems sort of odd. The game insisted that I make a dock, but I could have just plopped some stuff down on another island anyway (presumably this is something you'd fix later.) There's definitely the kernel of a Civ/RTS sort of game in here but the level of challenge is not there at this point.

Thanks for playing phydeaux, and thanks for the feedback! I did go ahead and change the genre of the game to include exploration. I wanted different islands to each have a different sort of feel to them, and a different little story associated with it. Actraiser originally did that pretty well, even though a lot of the gameplay aspects were different. So I focused on the exploration sort of thing without making it a game you could 'lose' at (which is kind of something that we usually end up doing with our contract games we make).

Yeah, the dock is needed to trigger plot advancement in a few spots. There was sort of some code to prevent building if you hadn't sailed someone to an island, but I didn't quite finish it. Now that the deadline is expended I think I'll try to finish that tomorrow- unfortunately I'm not at home right now.

I'd be interested in other ideas you might have about adding challenge to the came without really causing the player to irrevocably fail in their world. (Original thoughts were having a player fail in an attempt to colonize a new island, being wiped out by bears and needing to send another party, but I'm not quite sure how that would work out. Maybe it can stand to get harder after those first two islands anyway.

(Oct 1, 2011 08:26 PM)AndyKorth Wrote: I'd be interested in other ideas you might have about adding challenge to the came without really causing the player to irrevocably fail in their world. (Original thoughts were having a player fail in an attempt to colonize a new island, being wiped out by bears and needing to send another party, but I'm not quite sure how that would work out. Maybe it can stand to get harder after those first two islands anyway.

I think on a basic level, constraining the player's resources further would make the game more playable. If you (god forbid) look at a game like Farmville, the gameplay in the game is to have the player gather resources to build the next great thing, so you need 4 twigs to build a hut, 4 huts to have enough people to build a henhouse, 4 hens in your henhouse to lay one egg, etc. One reason I'm bringing this up is that such a game has a tall tech tree that continually creates goals for the player in order to advance down the tree- even more so than the tech tree in Starcraft since that is Farmville's entire premise.

I think what you have doesn't have to change fundamentally, but it just needs to balanced a little more. Constrain the player further so they can only make so many guys, and for using god powers like creating a tree or fire, make some sort of charging meter to do it so the player can't spam it. One good constraint you have is that you can't get rocks until you dock to an island that has them, so having the player figure that out is a slight challenge. You could do that with other resources- for example in the first island if there was another constraint such as you can only hold so much wood until you create a house that holds more (and you can't create that house on the first island because the population cap is too low or something), it forces the player to expand out to more islands to creatively figure out how to expand their resources enough to accomplish their goals.

I used the last few hours to add a bunch of things! I think I did add a bit to the challenge. You can't cast miracles (like making mans) on islands you haven't gotten to via a dock. I've also finished up unlocking lightning.

Another progression point is building a barracks to train soldiers. Only soldiers can defeat the guards at the pyramid and castle. So I think that's a good constraint that the player overcomes by advancing to stone, to making a barracks. They're enough resources to build a temple, but making a barracks requires the stone miracle, or sailing to minor islands.

Destroying the pyramid unlocks lightning.

Also, the number of tents/huts/houses you build limits how many mans you can create. I think that should help a lot.

I also added an easter egg, but it's tough to find!

Thanks for your feedback, and I hope everyone enjoys the game!

(I think controlling tree growth would be nice, that would make it a limiter like stone... but that'd only work if lumberyards and docks were made out of food.... it would work great gameplay-wise, but fail the 'makes sense' test...)

Wow, now we're talking. This build is a lot better and it was fun enough that I wanted to explore all the islands to see what was there. The only thing that wasn't balanced was how much lumber and food could be reaped. Great job!